Ship of Spies

Near the middle of Alan Furst's new novel, ''Dark Voyage,'' Busby Berkeley's 1933 musical ''Footlight Parade'' is screened on the deck of a tramp freighter sailing from Tangier to Lisbon. The projector runs too fast, and the wind off the water distorts the sheet serving as the screen. Not all the crew speak English but they speak the lingua of the movie. It's a fun-house midnight matinee, and a strangely poetic one.

That fast-forwarded film on a flapping screen in front of a polyglot crew could almost be a metaphor for the odd shapes and rhythms Furst has brought to another familiar genre, the World War II espionage thriller. ''Dark Voyage'' is the eighth of his wonderful spy novels, and there are passages that could be passed off as the work of both a meticulous narrative craftsman at the top of his game and a symbolist poet. Flip the book open at random and pull out a sentence: ''A white city, and steep; alleys, souks and cafes, their patrons gathering for love and business as the light faded away''; ''Tile floor, bare wooden tables, a few customers, more than one reading a newspaper with dinner''; ''He had once, in some forgotten port, watched sailors in the Soviet Navy as they smeared paint on with their hands''; ''Black, oval cigarettes with gold rims, and heavy perfume''; ''By then it was very late, the tables mostly deserted, and the propriétaire opened the door for them as they left, letting in the cool April night.''

In ''Dark Voyage'' Furst continues the highly disciplined, fragmentary phrasing he employed in the two novels that preceded it, ''Kingdom of Shadows'' and ''Blood of Victory.'' There were moments, in that last book, when Furst seemed to be telling the story in something approaching Morse code. Here the language is still compacted but richer, with more room made for Furst the sensualist to indulge himself. (He's one of the few espionage writers who knows how to write sex scenes.) I confess there are moments when I miss the expansiveness of novels like ''Dark Star'' and the gorgeously titled ''The World at Night'' and the odd characters who lurked around the edges of those books. But Furst appears to be moving toward the aesthetic of certain musicians -- Miles Davis and Charlie Watts spring to mind -- the people who make every sparse note count and whose muted control throws into relief their sudden bursts of lyricism.

''Dark Voyage'' refers to the journeys of a Dutch freighter disguised as a ship from Spain (a neutral country in World War II) and pressed into service to do some of the work of the British merchant vessels being picked off by Nazi sea power. The captain, Eric DeHaan, is, like all his creator's heroes and like the author himself, a romantic pragmatist. (DeHaan keeps Colette's Claudine novels, ''the perfect compass south to his north,'' among his carefully selected cabin library.) Furst has never skimped on the ugly moral choices the war involved (and has never fallen for the guff that Communism provided a way to embrace freedom and peace in the face of fascism), but he has -- thankfully -- never moralistically denied either himself or his readers the romance of espionage.

At times, ''Dark Voyage,'' set in the spring of 1941, while Allied Europe waited for America to enter the war, might be a Beckettian comedy of waiting for DeHaan, his crew and the various operatives slinking around the novel's corners. Furst lulls us into the atmosphere, allows us to imbibe his descriptions and then, in the last 50 pages, turns the screws. The denouement of ''Dark Voyage'' is both breathless and utterly relaxed, not so pell-mell that Furst can't stop to be amused at the ironies of shifting alliances. If he ever breaks a sweat, it doesn't show.

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A version of this review appears in print on August 15, 2004, on Page 7007007 of the National edition with the headline: Ship of Spies. Today's Paper|Subscribe